


Sleuth Wood

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Children's Stories, Episode: s03e02 The Sign of Three, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Fairies, Fatherhood, Love, Marriage, Memories, Pining, Redbeard - Freeform, Relationship Negotiation, lost and stolen things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-18 01:54:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1410646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John comes up the steps with the baby strapped to his chest. </p>
<p>For now, in this universe far from careless, you’re still here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleuth Wood

**Author's Note:**

> Title from: 
> 
> _WHERE dips the rocky highland_   
> _Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,_   
> _There lies a leafy island_   
> _Where flapping herons wake_   
> _The drowsy water rats; _  
>  _There we've hid our faery vats,_  
>  _Full of berrys_  
>  _And of reddest stolen cherries._  
>  _Come away, O human child!_  
>  _To the waters and the wild_  
>  _With a faery, hand in hand,_  
>  _For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.—W.B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”___

 

John comes up the steps with the baby strapped to his chest. He looks ( _is_ ) angry. The baby ( _Elanor, her name is Elanor; her middle name’s mine_ ) looks calm as the sea ( _at the south coast, where the cottage is, will be_ ). She’s a bird. She looks like a bird. Fairy bluebird from _A Century of Birds of the Himalaya,_ dark and bright, sketched by a strange hand; some kind of bird, yes, not to be deleted.

_Don't see your mother in you (or I do)._

He's never deduced a baby before. She looks at him serious, blue-eyed, not full of the forgotten wisdom of the world, not promise or innocence but something else. Something else entirely.

John holds her next to his heart, with secret and dogtag, bullet wound and time. 

*****

An argument with Mary then, not just a visit, a stroll; a disagreement, something small gone mitotic, exponential, something about his ( _shirt buttoned quickly, no belt_ ) restlessness, his need for what, for this. Mary’s mouth done, just then, with the understanding.

Sherlock ushers them in, shuts the door, points John to his chair with its patch of rain.

“I’ll just take her with me then, give you a break.” What he said to Mary, he says, and sits.

Elanor hitches, kicks, looks round with calm eyes, maybe her father’s; the hair’s from somewhere else entirely.

Sherlock puts his fingers together, considers.

“You had a row.”

“Brilliant.” John’s hand moves over his daughter’s ribs, a shell.

“Mary’s at least partially right.”

“Yeah.”

“Tea?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Below Mrs Hudson, a shuffling, above rain beginning, chilly with spring.

*****

“Things don’t have to be different you know. We’ll still do…all this.” Is what John said, is what he’s saying now, even with the baby strapped to his chest, even with his daughter strange in his arms.

_I don’t see your mother in you, or I do._

Elanor’s upright in her little sling, looking at glints on his beakers, his flasks.

Outside London’s a wash. Inside reagents and milk. Milk warming in the microwave. Relocated phalanges.

“Cornea with the tea?" he says, “I’m fresh out of whole eyeballs.”

John’s breath goes warm, sudden, at his neck. Laughter drops his shoulders, drops the baby to his waist. He braces her up.

“God, Sherlock, I’m just not good at …”

“Marriage?”

“No, not…well, yes, marriage. Marriage and …this, whatever this is.”

His eyes make a circuit of the kitchen, quick and unlike, scouting out a roost.

Elanor blinks and kicks, still won’t wail.

“Ah.”

_Fatherhood. Friendship. Love.This._

“Thought it’d be the same, but …”                     

“The two of us against the world.”

“Yes, you…yes you bastard, that.”

John’s laugh so familiar, paralytic and balm.

“And I … I can’t protect her from the things we’ve seen. Done.”

“John.”

“Too late to protect her, you know. She’s already born.”

Elanor makes a small sound. A thud below, something Mrs Hudson’s dropped, will wait for later to retrieve.

_"_ Well, I swore to, you know. All of you. Us.”

“Yes I know.”

John’s toes on the floor shifting,( _shirt buttoned in haste),_ left hand working at the baby’s hip, breath sudden and warm.

_Vowed to protect you though no one can._

_You know she'll fly away one day._

_But I never will, never again._

He carries the tea to their chairs. John brings the milk, and there’s quiet, tea and the view, traffic, Baker Street, home again. John’s shed anorak( _new, brighter, a Mary colour_ ) on the back of the chair; the baby’s bag, her soft cradle-things, nested on the floor.

*****

“Come away o human child,” his grandmére read, and oh he was, for a time.

Whispers about eggshells and elf mounds, the old country, pixies with French names, stock and fetch and foxglove and fire.

“They’ll take me away,” he whispered, curled to her jumpered shoulder, “I’m still small enough.”

“The wind’ll do that,” Mycroft said, “if you’re not careful, little brother, if you’re not good. When it blows easterly over the garden, blows the little people in with it. Or maybe they’ve already stolen you. Maybe you’re not really here after all. Or not really _you_.”

Mycroft winked, tapped his nose.

Terrifying.

He found Mycroft’s missing glasses, an old umbrella long gone, told his father where to find a lost ticket, brought mum the notes she thought she’d never see; was good, so good, all the misplaced, the lost of the household recovered in a day, to be worthy, to stay.

“What have you done,” Mycroft said when he found Sherlock shaking in the garden. “Sherlock,” Mycroft said, and gathered him up rough, “under a tree in the rain is no place for a boy of seven at midnight. What were you doing out there?”

“Waiting,” he said, “to see if I’m still here.”

“Oh, Sherlock.”

Carried inside, wrapped, plied with sugar, he still shook. “Iron and eggshells,” grandmére said, “we’d know if you were a changeling; you’d say _, I’ve seen the acorn before the oak, but never have I seen this._ Have you ever said anything like that?”

“No, but I’ve said lots of other things people think are odd.”

“It’s all right. To be a bit different.”

“It doesn’t matter Sherlock, you’re here. It’s all right. You can stay.”

There might have been a whispered apology, a faint memory. The next day a fever, a great deal of sweet tea, an armful of Irish Setter.

A trip in the mind-wild.

In the past month he’s found two paintings, a necklace, a spouse, some funds gone astray, three drug dens. London’s a wood with a dark heart, things thicketed for him to find, wind always in the branch, in the half-remembered eaves.

*****

A cup clinks on the table, brings his eyes from the horizon.

“Sherlock,” John’s saying, “you all right?

“Yes,” he says, slips a hand into the pocket of his jacket, “quite all right.”

“Do you think you could…?”

John slumped on the sofa, ( _lids low_ , _worn, of course, I didn’t quite see_ ), Elanor cupped in his lap.

“Watch her. Of course. She’s got part of my name. I think I can mind her.”

“She’s…”

“I’ve got her,” he says, though no-one does. “Have a sleep.”

Nothing strange, he might whisper to the baby, about those stories, just ways people thought to describe difference, neurological, physical; he might have embraced them himself, not let them fall into a file with the old trivia, kept them with things he has need of. He does.

He might imagine her a mobile of deleted stars, magnetic north to find the way, tell her yes, for now, bird, in this universe far from careless, you’re still here.

*****

John sleeps on the sofa. Elanor sleeps in her little sling.

On the table John’s mobile blinks on, buzzes alive.

He says hello, quiet, listens for her breath.

“Is he with you?”

“Yes, they’re fine,” he says, picks it out, sharp, the fear in her voice.

“I was,” she says, “a bit of an arsehole.”

“So was he. He’s sleeping it off now.”

She laughs, short and familiar, bitter, a balm.

“Sherlock. You’ve got her, yeah?”

“I’ll keep her safe.”

_As much as anyone can._

Elanor twists in her sleep, her mother’s voice or some other, distant, wings and the rain on the still-thrumming roof.

_Your mother, your father too; and I._

*****

Pin feathers. The tiny corners of her eyes. The shining spikes of her eyelashes.

Quietly he pins up scenes, the latest crimes, while she looks on, kicking, then shifts in her sleep, her hair dark as kelp.

John, exhausted, father-exhausted, from home, from action, with want of action, with want of what he won’t say, snores soft on the sofa. 

Mrs Hudson puts her head in, smiles and stops, withdraws.

He keeps watch. It's something he's done. 

He lights the fire. Fetches a blanket. Elanor flaps in her sleep.

He touches gingerly. Lifts her bright and dark on his shoulder to the window with its reflected flame, lights through from the street, the city awake with the twilight sorrows.

_You’ll fly one day. Find where you belong. Where you come from._

_I’ll stay._

Sherlock rocks on his toes, looks at his London, cradles his stolen, his lost-and-recovered.

Elsewhere, not far, his brother puts a finger to the screen, enlarges, zooms in, puts a finger to the screen over the baby's blue eye.


End file.
